Episode 9: Bandersnatch interview with Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker

Now that Bandersnatch is safely out in the world, Charlie Brooker can talk about the making of it, the endings he likes and the secret hidden things we might never find, thanks to the editing process!

I sat down with him this week to write a profile for New Statesman. Here’s a taster:

“It’s like the world functions as a Black Mirror alert system for me,” he continues. “Where people just say, ‘Have you seen this? This is a bit Black Mirror isn’t it?’ Yeah. It is. I would say it’s slightly terrifying, but is it the worst thing China has to face at the moment? Probably not. I mean, there’s climate change…”

Scroll down below the YouTube video for the full transcript of the episode.

Charlie Brooker and his Black Mirror co-creator Annabel Jones were on the post-Bandersnatch press tour, kind of the opposite to how it usually works. For those of us who have seen / played Bandersnatch, it’s easy to see why there weren’t interviews before the release, or preview screeners – one detail being leaked, or the previews breaking Netflix – and the whole post-Christmas joy of this launch would’ve been muted. A it happened, the release of Bandersnatch was a gigantic worldwide event that trended for days. It’s a part of the future that Black Mirror never predicted – eventually, we’d all be watching Black Mirror at the same time, all across the world.

So, Charlie and I talked about politics, 80s music, how much his kids love the Alexa and Black Mirror Season 5. Well, I tried to get him to talk about the last one, and he did a good job of, well, you listen for yourself. Netflix have nothing to be concerned about, let me tell you.

Transcript:

Charlie Brooker: When no one seems worried, when it seems like everything’s tickety-boo, that’s when I really worry.

Suchandrika Chakrabarti: In the 90s?

CB: In the 90s, thing were sort of – I mean they weren’t, but they felt sort of tickety-boo. That’s when I really worry, because I think, that’s too good to be true, what the fuck’s going to…? At the moment, everyone’s like, ‘This is fucked, everything is fucking fucked‘. Which makes me conversely just somewhat optimistic.

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So, earlier this week, I sat down with Charlie Brooker, and wrote a profile of him for New Statesman magazine, I’ll put the link the in the show notes. And obviously, we talked about Bandersnatch, which ha been the Choose-You-Own-Adventure on Netflix that everyone’s been talking about. I also asked him for details on Black Mirror Season 5… didn’t get that many! But sometimes, you know, I think it’s what he didn’t say, that gave it away. And we also delve into his memories of the 80s being recreated in Bandersnatch, the music and how much his kids love the Alexa.

SC: Yeah, do you want to start with that? So, I’ll give you an example: ten schools in China are giving pupils uniformswithchipsthatrecordtheirlocation, andthere’sfacialrecognition, sotheycan’tfallasleepinclass…youscared?

And so I read one thing saying this is just like Black Mirror, and then I read another article that says, no, it’s not, it’s not, come on, stop demonising the Chinese, it’s not that sinister. And then, so, it certainly sounds sinister. Yeah, sounds pretty sinister. Um, yeah, I would say it’s slightly terrifying.

It’s a bit like… I can’t work out how terrifying it is, because it’s sort of happening over there on the other side of a hill. It’s a bit like knowing that some something potentially horrifying is happening on the other side of a hill, which may make its way here. Should I only care about it when it’s affecting me and my family, I don’t know. It’s coming isn’t, it’s coming.

CB: Our six-year-old watchesvideosofMinecraftandRobloxandstufflikethis,andhe’s obsessedwith videos of people playing obscure Super Mario mods, where they’ve modified levels and stuff like this. He knows everything there is to know about Mario… anyway, sorry, I digress.

SC: Do you want to make something that they can watch?

CB: Um,well,theycanwatchmystuffeventually.

SC: Yeah, but not for quite a while.

CB: It would be nice, it’d be good, I mean it’d be a challenge, to do a U-certificate Black Mirror, I mean… are any of our episodes… maybe…

SC: Hang the DJ?

CB: There’s a bit of sex in that. Nosedive… oh no, there’s a bit of swearing in that…

SC: The breakdown at the end is hard to…

CB: There’s a lot of swearing in that, yeah, and a woman with a knife… ummm… Hang the DJ’s the closest ifyoudon’tmindsexandbadlanguage… mygod,that’sdepressingisn’tit.

SC: No, because remember watching TVwithyourparentswhenyouwereakid, and there werealwaysa couple of scenes where you were like, why am I here with them?

SC: So he’s got a while before he watches Black Mirror then. So, with a Choose-You-Own-Adventure, is that something we could use in elections? If voters had seen how a Leave of Trump vote might have panned out –

CB: Oh, I see.

SC: – would they have done something different?

CB: That’s the fantasy, isn’t it? Possibly like a virtual reality headset that you have to put on and it boils down the next ten years, then it takes you two minutes to experience that, so you see the ramifications of your decision. Um, I guess? I mean, they’re already at Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, aren’t they?

SC: Could you have scripted the last two years, even with all the Twine and everything? No.

CB: No. No. And it’s obviously been very, very busy doing this. So, because I haven’t been doing the Screenwipe shows, I’ve not been watching the news. I spent years watching it, so I’ve deliberately not, and what’s depressing is the news seems to be stuck as well. It seems to be stuck in shit mode. It’s just Brexit all day long, every day, just like Brexit deadlock, noone’shappy. Everyonewantsawayoutofit. Andtheredoesn’tseemtobeone.

CB: Well yes, I’dsorthopeIhopewehopeitallgoesaway, out of just sheer boredom.

SC: It’d be embarrassing for us as a country, but I think we’ve been embarrassed enough.

CB: Yeah, although the States is rivalling us for that now, isn’t it, for embarrassment, generally? Well, not embarrassment, but it’s undeniably interesting, what’s going on in the States.

SC: No one mentioned it at the Golden Globes the other night, no one mentioned it in the hosting. SoIthinkpeopleareabitdone,they’rejustlikehe’sacrazyterribleman,hedoesn’tstandforus.Let’swaituntilwegetridofhim,RobertMueller willsort it.

CB: Well I sort of have had to, in a contrary way, I’ve said this before: when no one seems worried, when it seems like everything’s tickety-boo, that’s when I really worry.

Suchandrika Chakrabarti: In the 90s?

CB: In the 90s, thing were sort of – I mean they weren’t, but they felt sort of tickety-boo. That’s when I really worry, because I think, that’s too good to be true, what the fuck’s going to…? At the moment, everyone’s like, ‘This is fucked, everything is fucking fucked‘. Which makes me conversely just somewhat optimistic, becausethatmakesmefeellike, oh,soeveryone’sonthelookout,andeveryone’sworried, andeveryone’sengaged,andeveryone’sthinking,sohopefully,collectively,wewillactuallysortthisstuffout.

SC: Which of the previous Black Mirrors did Bandersnatch have the most in common with?

CB: Playtest is one which is about games in a way probably more than Bandersnatch is

SC: And messing with someone’s mind?

CB: Messing with someone’s mind. White Bear, obviously there’s the symbol from White Bear that shows up a lot in Bandersnatch, and that was one of those nice little moments where we have the idea for Bandersnatch, where you know the conceit was Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, and the person you’re giving commands to becomes aware that you are there, basically, so you are the problem in the story.

And at one point early on, I was trying to draw a flowchart, and I drew a sort of thing that branched off, and I thought oh hang on that looks like that’s the symbol from White Bear, well we’ve got to incorporate that in the story, and it seemed thematically right, so actually there’s a bit of stuff in there, there’s one branch he goes down where he sort of believes, he has a dream about this government conspiracy thing program and control thing.

No one noticed there was a meant to be a thing in there that says Pax, on it and there’s a British lion symbol, which is meant to be the thing that Jerome F. Davis saw in the past, Pax, which is this lion figure…

SC: On the LSD thing?

CB: Yes, so many to be the British lion was sort of what that was. Anyway, so that tied into White Bear that was sort of what that was, so it nods at quite a few.

SC: The one where it’s revealed as a film set, which is probably my favourite ending.

CB: Oh, I like that one. Yeah, I think that’s Fionn’s, who was playing Stefan, I think that’s his favorite ending. I do like that one because it’s so stupid. Originally that whole path, that whole fourth wall breaking Netflix path, originally that was a bit more hidden and the idea was going to be that you couldn’t get to it on first play through, it would arrive as an option on your second play through but we opened it up earlier on, because we thought it was so different to the other paths, that we thought it was worth doing that. It can be it can slightly jar with people because it’s such a tonal shift, so it does affect how some people react to the whole piece. It depends on whether they chose the symbol or Netflix, if they have those choices at that point, anyway, oh again, I digress.

SC: What did I even ask?

CB: I know!

SC: I asked which of the previous – that’s fine. Ithinkthere’s are some shows about the at momentwithpeopletryingtotakebackcontrol,sohaveyouseen The FixwithJimmyCarr, which is on Netflix? Probablyyouhaven’tseen it…

CB: Yes,althoughyouknow what,you know he’s not real…! There’s an ending where he gets a nice closure… have you got the train ending?

SC: So he ends up dead?

CB: Yeah, but he’s happy! He’s at rest – come on, it’s Black Mirror! It’s interesting, some people have been like ‘I just want an ending where his game gets five stars and he’s happy!’ And you’re like, ‘yeah, but that would’ve been so fucking boring!’ You say you want it, perhaps coming from a ‘I want to beat the game perspective’… maybe we would have done that. Maybe we’ll do an expansion pack?

SC: Andisthereanythingthatparticularlyinformedyourrecreationofthe80s? I was born in the 80s-

CB: Unfortunately, I was born in 1971!

SC: You have real memories of the 80s. There’s something so charmingly almost analogue about computers from the 80s, they were so big and boxy… what was influencing you when you were recreating it?

CB: Oh no, the one in Ealing is like a fucking wasteland! Imean, theonesinrailwaystationsarestillreallywell stocked, but the one in Ealing, itwasjustabitlike, like, like, peopleseemtojustgointhereforthepostoffice. Yeah, basically.

SC: Howaboutthemusicaswellassomethatyoucouldn’thavemadeitwithout? Like, San Junipero [which Brooker has said he couldn’t imagine making without the rights to the Belinda Carlisle song, ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’.]?

We’ve got like Relax on there, it’s a lot of Tangerine Dream obviously, we’ve got a lot of British sort of synth-y, and there’s like Making Plans for Nigel, which again is not a song from 84, but we wanted it to feel like a British early 80s, so it would be differentiated from like Stranger Things, and things like that. I don’t think you see Britain of the early 80s often evoked in things… I guess Pride did it?

SC: You see the 70s, and the 80s is different, although there is a hangover.

CB: I think once BBC Four did a biopic of Sir Clive Sinclair, once,andapartfromthat, Idon’tthinkI’veseenthatsortofsideofthe80srecreated. For me, it was fun. If you look carefully, there’s early editions of Viz on Colin Ritman’s table. There’s copies of 2000 A. D. Stefan, at one point, when he’s on LSD, laughing his head off, is reading Bachelor Boys, The Young Ones spin-off book that came out, so those sorts of things were extremely evocative for me.

SC: Yeah, soinoneoftheendingswhenColin’sdaughterturnsup,you werehavingfunwiththenewspaperfrontpageandtickersandthings,andtherewassomethingabouttheCEO of SmithereenssittinginfrontofParliamentorCongress, is that a hint for an episode?

CB: Might be!

SC: Of course you wouldn’t tell…

CB: I wouldn’t take any storyline hints, though. Iwouldsaythattheremightbewordsandthingslikethatinthere,but,no,don’tthinkthere’sanystorylinehints.Hmm…

SC: Sowhatdoes Season5looklikethen,whatcanyoutellmeabout it?

CB: IcansayIcansayverylittle,butIcansayit’sa-coming,itwillbethisyear,sonottoolongtowait,andagainit’ssortof different to other seasons. That’s basically all I could say! You may have noticed we’ve got more and more secretive, which is why we we put this out like with very little warning!

SC: How much have you got left to shoot, have you still got to write stuff?

SC: So thanks to Charlie Brooker for talking to me about Bandersnatch and Black Mirror and all things that are technological and terrifying.

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